Distributed rendering of interactive soft shadows

Isard, M.; Shand, M.; Heirich, A.

Distributed rendering of interactive soft shadows

Files

071-076.pdf (245.14 KB)

Date

2002

Authors

Isard, M.
Shand, M.
Heirich, A.

Publisher

The Eurographics Association

Abstract

Recently several distributed rendering systems have been developed which exploit a cluster of commodity computers by connecting host graphics cards over a fast network to form a compositing pipeline. This paper introduces a new algorithm which takes advantage of the programmable compositing operators in these systems to improve the performance of rendering multiple shadow-maps, for example to produce approximate soft shadows. With an nVidia GeForce4 Ti graphics card the new algorithm reduces the number of required render nodes by nearly a factor of four compared with a naive approach. We show results that yield interactive-speed rendering of 32 shadows on a 9-node Sepia2a distributed rendering cluster.

        @inproceedings{:10.2312/EGPGV/EGPGV02/071-076
,
booktitle = {Eurographics Workshop on Parallel Graphics and Visualization
},
editor = {D. Bartz and X. Pueyo and E. Reinhard
},
title = {{Distributed rendering of interactive soft shadows
}},
author = {Isard, M. and 
Shand, M. and 
Heirich, A.
},
year = {2002
},
publisher = {The Eurographics Association
},
ISSN = {1727-348X
},
ISBN = {1-58113-579-3
},
DOI = {/10.2312/EGPGV/EGPGV02/071-076
}
}